Thursday, June 2, 2016

And that is the thing. The law of the Universe is such, the departing, the distancing of galaxies from themselves. Beethoven must have been famous for being private, and Mahler, echoing that... Not that this essaying here is trying to sound smart. The thing is privacy, the space free from outside question, the space from where creativity comes. Yes, almost a cliche. But that it's true.

Emily knew it. Her departure from the rest, her sensitivity to the cosmos, her little witnesses in plants and bird chirps. Indian pipe. The divergence of species. The bee is different from the butterfly. The iris is not the larch. Her natural instinct to seek the most private of spaces, confidences with little nieces.

The obscurity of the creative process. Shane MacGowan's process is unknown to James Fearnley, the songwriter a crazed hooligan to the accordionist of the Pogues in memoir form of Here Comes Everybody.

You can't share. You don't want interruption. The mood comes, you try it, you finish a sketch, do a few more, losing energy. That it all piles up, builds on itself is good, but in the meantime, there is rawness, a sense of adolescence, which perhaps is inevitable, one way or another, seen or unseen, it's up the personal choice of an artist, do you want to paint the hungered saltimbanques in all their thusness and all their sadness and emotion misery, or do you want to put yourself out there, Guernica, or some other way to say it.

That's the thing, Creativity? You want privacy.

A sensitive father, even though a different blood type, lets a son create in his own privacy, hard as that must be, very hard.

Everything pulls away from everything else. This is the law, The law of dark matter, and energy, and at the center of every galaxy, a black hole spinning things in, as if a balancing energy to that Big Bang which set everything into this suchness. At the very center.

The tragic black hole at the center holds us in orbit to each other
in the black blank space, fixtures of our night's sky
to look up at or out to in the great distance,
compelled to a point for lack of action,
not lack of potential of love.

And the flesh that lumbers on unknowingly, with some increasing great self-confidence, some vision, those can be the foolish of people, the less than wise. The ones who can call the artist's sketch the work of a blithering idiot.

About Me

Gandhi tells us to be the change we want to see in the world. I wanted to see a blog on writing. Not necessarily the craft stuff, the things you could learn in a classroom, but the basic matters (and mysteries) of creativity, depth and subject matter.
I am a veteran barman of Washington, DC. My novel, A Hero For Our Time, a modern retelling of Hamlet, is available on Amazon.com. (My thanks to Mr. Lermontov, God rest his soul, for allowing me to nod to his singular classic.)
What makes writing literature? Writing will always be an art form to honor.